Upon further inspection, however, what really wows us about Droganes’s case is the fate of his former stock, all of which was seized in a 2007 raid:

In all, agents confiscated 1 million pounds of fireworks. They’re being stored in bunkers at a former ammunition plant in Nebraska at a cost to the government of $87,500 a month, McClure said. The government has acknowledged that some of the fireworks are legal, and Droganes has asked for their return. Another attorney, Gary Sergent of O’Hara, Ruberg, Taylor, Sloan & Sergent, claimed in court papers that the legal fireworks are valued at $3 million.

As we understand it, Droganes’s claim here is solid, given that the government has openly acknowledged that some of the cache is legal. So, whose job will it be to sift through 1 million pounds of fireworks in order to separate the legal from the illegal? And how much will that add to the $1.84 million tab that the government has already paid simply to store the evidence?

The obvious solution would be to make a trade with Droganes: Suspend his sentence, in exchange for his consent to give Nebraska the biggest fireworks show in history. But we get the feeling that such a logical conclusion isn’t in the cards.